That’s quite frightening for potential oil-riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry who hire such folk.

I was lucky enough to be at a presentation from Kevin McNulty from Coole Immersive yesterday, part of the Visual Web Convention. They’ve made a simulation game that allows new oil-riggers to get that first six months’ experience for free. That’s to say, the likelihood they’ll have a reportable accident drops to <5% if they’ve used the game. That’s a fairly cast-iron case for games in the workplace, if you ask me.

Earlier in the day, Lord Puttnam gave a challenging keynote suggesting that this field - serious games - was a potential answer to the work he was doing with the climate change commission in the House of Lords. Briefly, his argument was that younger people are more likely to engage with games than any other media - I’d agree with this but suggest that older people are also gamers. Games are also blessed with the ability to offer experiential learning unlike any other pedagogic technique currently available - I think the oil rigger case study shows that’s true. Communicating the things that all of us need to do to avoid the looming disaster that climate change will bring is a tough problem for all professional communicators. We held a private event this week for advertising professionals called Can Advertising Save the Planet? The answer is probably ‘no’, but as communicators, we have the ability and responsibility to make things a little easier and better - the disaster is imminent, after all, but even the lowest of the low can do something to help.

If we are to steer society away from catastrophe and into education, games will have a key part to play.

Unfortunately, as Puttnam admitted, as soon as something is called a ‘game’ then bureaucracy and government recoils. The idea of our government lending public support, and ultimately money, to games, is stymied by its vocabulary. Games are trivial and a social harm in the minds of most bureaucrats and, sadly, most newspaper editors (see the press about the recent Byron Review which, while admitting a need for some governance over which titles were available to younger gamers, was overwhelmingly in favour of video games as a learning resource, if you bother to read the whole thing).

Flipping back to climate change and the emergency we face communicating the facts about it and what needs to be done, then games provide an excellent opportunity. But the flip-side of the problem with bureaucrats then sets in - entertainment providers are terrified of being associated with anything remotely ‘worthy’. Being ethical is, apparently, uncool.  There have already been a few brave attempts - World without Oil, the BBC’s Climate Challenge and others. But the likes of Sony, EA and Microsoft aren’t developing or promoting these sorts of titles. What needs to happen to make the big games publishers alert to their power to change the future?

[Update - Robin Blandford has some videos of what this looks like and a challenge for the rescue industry]

I have three invitations to Ffffound, if you like pictures. First come, first served in the comments.

Most of the people there - from the worlds of media, education and policy making - agreed that there was some need for action on digital media literacy (I guess none of us would have turned up, otherwise) but there were some interesting tensions between the participants about what that might entail, who it is for and why we need it.

This debate is often framed in terms of fear of and for children. Our society is at once terrified of our youngsters and terrified for them. The Finnish multimurderer yesterday was predictably dubbed the ‘YouTube Killer’ by the Mail and Telegraph in this morning’s editions, Ewan McIntosh pointed out. As though his video posts were somehow a reason for the outrage. Adults fret about the amount of time kids spend on the Internet, talking in code. Think about stories about "teenagers …being groomed to be suicide bombers," or the countless stories about hoodies. (Almost every teenage boy in the UK wears a hooded top, yet ‘hoodies’ are framed as a social menace in the popular press here). The other image of children on the Internet is diametrically opposite - the child as victim, as the potential victim of an army of ’sick paedos’, who for some reason, have forsaken parks and schools, and other places where children might actually physically appear, for the Internet.

A lot of the way some sections of society think about children and the Internet is actually about adults and the Internet. Things that are threatening or frightening get projected onto children as a way of distancing ourselves from that.

This is about adults not understanding the Internet, not understanding teens, and demonising both as a consequence. The obvious contradictions in this view are neatly ignored.

Matt Locke made some great points about the need or lack of need for digital media literacy. He argued that the reason that people run into problems on the Internet is because the technology doesn’t work well enough yet. Most people actually have a very good understanding of the protocols and rules that govern internet communications. That there are basically six spaces on the ‘net and we already know how they should run:

1. Private spaces. For 1:1 communications, like email and private chats.
2. Group spaces: for a defined group with a certain interest to talk about that interest. Like newsgroups or forums, also Facebook and Bebo.
3. Public spaces: where you publish whatever you’re producing for the world to share. Most blogs and sites like YouTube fall into this category.
4. Performance spaces: online games come here, maybe some more competitive social media spaces, too.
5. Participation spaces: where a common goal is negotiated publically between individuals, e.g. eBay, Threadless, MySociety.
6. Watching spaces: because not everyone wants to be taking part all the time.

The problems occur because our current technological renditions of these spaces are not advanced, nuanced or simple enough. Private communications fall into the public arena. Commercial entities enter our groups unwanted. This isn’t about our understanding of the medium; what causes problems is the medium’s inability to provide an adequate service to fulfil the roles we demand of it.

So… digital media literacy. Is it kids or adults who need it the most? Not sure, but start with Paul Dacre, wherever it ends up. What does it entail? One delegate, from the National Media Museum, made the point that issues with online media and publishing can largely be addressed without knowing anything about code, codecs, XHTML, MP3s or film editing. A big issue is ‘when is it fair?’ - when is it fair to share a piece of video you’ve taken on your phone with friends or the public, for example? The answer to that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with experience and moral insight. That’s a very valid point and general teaching from parents and the formal education system still has a huge role to play, as redundant as they may feel if they fail to master iMovie. Another huge issue for me is whether anyone is ready to start delivering digital media literacy lessons that are sufficiently distinct from former understandings of mass media (e.g. Williams, McLuhan, Althusser, Eagleton, Hall). The theorisation of personalised, syndicated, personally-produced media is still very much in its infancy. We have our Marx and Engels, perhaps, but not our Volosinov or Gramsci.

via. Communities Dominate Brands

And apparently the most blogged about video on the ‘net at the moment. The URL of the creators, fleetingly referred to towards the end is http://www.mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”

‘Too Much Choice‘ is about the ways in which the democracy of the Net might be making it harder to find quality new acts. Forget about whatever you’ve heard about the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, Lili Allen and Sandi Thom achieving fame through an organic word-of-mouth movement in social networks. They were all PR campaigns conducted after those artists had already signed a record deal. The reality is 420,000 rock acts and 400,000 hip hop acts available via MySpace alone, with only their friends’ count as a guide to their quality. How are you going to find the best new music?

Jonathan’s a pretty connected guy and he’s signed up industry veteran Tom Robinson (war baby, glad to be gay, 2-4-6-8 motorway) to deliver a keynote presentation and then he’s got a panel discussion with some real luminaries from across the industry:

Paul Brown
European Managing Director, Pandora Media

Richard Fero
Insight Manager, Emap

David Jennings
Director, DJ Alchemi Ltd and author, "Net, Blogs & Rock ‘n’ Roll"

Andrew Keen
Journalist and author, "The Cult Of The Amateur"

Charlie Rapino
Producer, Remixer and A&R, Universal

Do please come along. I can’t promise fireworks, but I’m hoping for some.

My own take on the topic is that, for me, there have always been more good bands that I want to find out more about than there is time to listen to music. That the music press & radio is, and has always been corrupt, and have promoted poor acts in relation to their advertising spend and industry contacts. Popular web 2.0 engines like Pandora (be interested to find out if a UK service is on the cards again) and Last.fm are just desserts for those guys - they do a great job of finding me new stuff that I like. Word-of-mouth has always worked best when it comes to investigating new acts and that the aforesaid services do a great job of automating that. That Fake Steve Jobs nailed why the traditional music guys are probably screwed in the digital world back in July.

That said, most of my new music influence actually comes via old media viz. Uncut magazine and especially its cover disc. Is that heresy, hypocrisy or just a data point about attention economics?

GREAT Shadow Puppetry - Watch today’s top amazing videos here

Found on Ursi’s blog - who is doing a fine job of gathering cool bits and pieces from all over the place.

I wonder if the jump in version numbers to 0.9 indicates anything about how close the program is to launch and - hopefully - the introduction of some better content? I’ve heard conflicting rumours about this in the last couple of weeks.

Update: All gone - whew - that was fast.

Update #2: See the comments. 1 May soft launch, apparently. But they’ll need a lot more compelling content by that point to make it work, in my opinion.

Joost uses peer-to-peer technology, similarly to BitTorrent, to distribute copy-protected broadcast TV between users. It’s very simple to set up and you don’t need to tweak any settings to make it work perfectly. There are about 12 channels available with a choice of about 20 programmes on each channel. The video quality is very good compared to YouTube and similar - and probably better than regular TV if you sit 20 inches from the screen, the way you do with a computer. They make their money from short adverts every 10 minutes or so. Just a single advert, but presumably, because they have virtually no costs and highly targeted audiences, they can make a reasonable profit on these.

But it kind of reminds me why I don’t watch regular TV. The content they’ve managed to pull together appears to be a compilation of Channel 5 rejects (Channel 5 is the worst British TV station, overseas readers). There’s a whole channel of ‘The World’s Strongest Man’ and another devoted to a car programme that isn’t as good as Top Gear. I started watching the promisingly-titled ‘Indie Flix’ channel, but found that by ‘indie’ they really meant ‘unwatchable tripe’. Fratelli-TV, if you like.

There’s talk of a further deal between Viacom and Joost, which already has an MTV channel from the company. Viacom recently had 100,000 video clips pulled from YouTube. Hopefully, that content is about to find a new home and fingers-crossed that might give me the incentive to try it a second time.

Update: Stuart was clearly in the same batch of new testers as me and shares my feelings. Some salutary comments from Duncan to counter my impatience below.

By a 2-1 ratio, Americans say they would rather watch an old-fashioned TV evening news report’s coverage of an event than the sort of “citizen video” that has become increasingly popular. [...]

But the poll shows a generational divide emerging: One out of four younger Americans (ages 25 to 34) would prefer the video over conventional news coverage.

Republicans and Democrats by a 7-3 ratio would prefer an evening news report, while independents were slightly more willing to choose a citizen video.

By starting with the 2:1 ratio, the lead suggests some sort of victory for the mainstream, but also begs the question, ‘what about the other third?’ You’ll notice that the figures don’t really add up, too. Two-thirds of Americans would prefer a traditional broadcast, yet the generational divide shows that a quarter of youtube-savvy younger people prefer online video? Seventy percent of supporters of the mainstream parties prefer a mainstream report - thirty percent of those prefer what, then?

We’re missing the key statistic. What proportion of Americans would rather use online citizen-sourced media for their news?

There’s a whole lot of blurred lines here, of course. There are citizen videos on mainstream news sites. There are mainstream videos on Web 2.0 sites like YouTube. Blogs comment on newspapers; newspapers run their own blogs and source stories through the blogosphere. The logistics of such research are horrendous. If you get your tech news from digg, for example, you aren’t really eschewing mainstream media since most stories link back to mainstream sources at some point. But then again, you are because you aren’t using USA Today or similar as your portal. This isn’t some sort of competition, of course, but even these vague results show that the blur between mainstream professional journalist and dilettante enthusiast no longer really has any meaning.